Sharing – Why Trauma Returns Through Sex

We don’t talk about this enough among sexual assault survivors.

The brain does not store experience according to the language we later use to explain it. It does not file one event under love, another under abuse, one sensation under pleasure, another under fear, and then keep those categories cleanly separated. It learns by timing. What repeatedly happens together begins to become connected, particularly in childhood, when the systems governing arousal, fear, attachment, memory, and bodily regulation are still developing.

https://verahartmdphd.substack.com/p/why-the-body-returns-to-what-hurt

Mostly, as Vera points out, there’s a ton of shame around how our bodies react, so we don’t want to talk about it. Most of us struggle with the reality that our bodies responded to the abuse, because society tells us that might have meant we wanted it, as opposed to the simple fact that the nerves in your body respond to touch, sound, etc., because that is what they are designed to do.

Your nerve endings don’t know the context; they’re responding to a stimulus, the same way your eyes dilate when there isn’t enough light. You couldn’t stop it no matter how you tried. Shaming yourself, or anyone else, for the way their body reacted to abuse is similar to mocking them for the way their eyes dilate or the way they flinch when something is coming toward their face.

Because of this stigma, articles like the one above become rare and important reads. The stories shared in it might feel familiar to you as you read them, or they may help you understand what many survivors of sexual abuse deal with in their lives. When you’ve been sexually abused, sex and arousal can become very complicated things. That complication shouldn’t come with judgment, but we know that it too often does. The judgment doesn’t help anyone heal; in fact, it likely does even more harm.